Hartley Brody

We’ve all heard that the mobile web is “the next big thing”. And if you’re like me, you spend at least a few hours each week browsing the web on a mobile device. As a site owner, I knew that I should make my blog mobile optimized, but it sounded hard.

Would I have to create a whole new stylesheet for mobile users? I’d probably have to change the structure of my site or else just install a new theme, which I wasn’t happy about.

And how would I even detect that a visitor was on a mobile device? Using a list of mobile user agents? Aren’t there new ones coming out every month? What would I even have my site do if it detected a mobile browser? Redirect to a mobile subdomain? Gah, that sounds too complicated, I’ll do that next weekend…

But then I read an article on responsive web design using media queries, and five minutes later, I had a mobile optimized site. Here’s how.

What would happen if your Facebook account was hacked?

If someone were to gain access to your account, they could hijack your online identity, posting updates and sending messages to your friends. They could read your messages and other private communication, or change your privacy settings. They could even potentially change your password, locking you out of your own account and leaving you feeling violated and exposed.

With so much invested in our Facebook identities, it’s very important to keep them safe. Here are a few tactics you can use to ensure your Facebook account is only available to you.

There are a million different ways to host a website these days. A weekend hobbyist can setup a free wordpress account in minutes, while a large corporation might hire a team of professionals to keep its site running smoothly.

If your hobby site is starting to turn into something more serious, it can be hard to know what your next steps are, short of paying someone to manage everything for you.

Fortunately, there are lots of free tools that are easy to use that you can setup right now to help you monitor your website and keep it stable, safe and secure.

You should enjoy your site’s growth, not be worried about it! These are all tools that I’ve used for my own websites, and they’ve made it fun to watch my traffic numbers rise, instead of worrying about problems with stability or performance.

Before we get started, you should make sure you have a basic understanding of how the internet works. I’ve written about the basic nuts and bolts here.

With more that 140 million Tweets sent per day, Twitter contains tons of information from the collective public conscious.

Twitter offers a free, public search tool that lets you search through every public Tweet over the last few days, and you don’t even need a Twitter account to use it. But sifting through all of that information can be a bit overwhelming.

Here are some Twitter search tips that I’ve found to be very helpful.

This is a question I get asked all the time. Millions of people have heard of HubSpot, and read all of our great content, but they aren’t really sure what our company actually does.

Is it consulting? Do we do web design? Advertising? SEO services?

Take two minutes and watch this video. And if you like what you see, sign up for a free 30-day trial!

You’re a busy person. You get tugged in a million directions every day. You try to keep your life as organized as possible, but your inbox is a mess. We’ve all been there.

The main flaw with modern email systems is that there is only one inbox, but we use our email accounts for so many different things.

Communicating with coworkers, managing to-do lists, keeping in touch, tracking receipts & shipments, receiving social media updates, archiving memories, following blogs… how can all of that be managed from one place!?

By default, Gmail wants you to have one inbox. Anything that isn’t in the inbox is either archived, spam or trash. Spam emails are deleted automatically every 30 days, so that’s not really a long term solution for storing email. And trash is - well - the trash.

But the archive is like limbo. Emails that are banished to the archive no longer reside in the inbox, but are still stored indefinitely. The archive is searchable by default, and emails in the archive can still be marked as read/unread, without affecting the unread count for your main inbox.

In essence, the archive is like a less-naggy version of the inbox – out of sight, out of mind. You can banish an email into the archive and it will disappear from your inbox, but it’s still there when you need to look for it later.

A fantastic way to cut down on clutter and manage your email more effectively is to make your archive behave like a series of individual, separate inboxes. And thanks to Gmail’s filters and labels, this is remarkably simple.

It’s the beginning of summer and a whole new crop of interns is starting at HubSpot. On the marketing team, we’re starting a brand new two-day training program, and I was asked to give a thirty minute presentation on “How to be a Successful Intern at HubSpot”.

When I started at HubSpot five months ago, I was immediately thrown into the mix and didn’t get much formal “training” at all. HubSpot is known for its high-energy, fast-paced culture and I was really excited to join the team – but I wasn’t as ready as I thought I was.

I spent my first month floundering around, unsure of basic operating procedures, as well as broader business survival skills. I had my fair share of missteps along the way – at one point I was trying to figure out if I’d be able to make it until August without getting fired…

But after many weeks – and a little coaching from my fantastic boss – I started to turn things around. I began to feel that I was becoming a team member who was adding value to the organization, instead of a dead-weight intern that everyone else was dragging along.

This post is an adaption of the presentation I gave to the new batch of interns, summarizing the three main lesson I’ve learned in my first five months at HubSpot. And at the end, I’ll provide some science to back it all up.

If you have a website or blog, you probably already have social media share buttons all over the place. Blog articles, product pages, landing pages, and pretty much anywhere else you have content that you want your visitors to share.

The benefits is obvious – people can easily post your links for their networks to see, generating referral traffic to your website. Then, anyone who is connected to this person sees your content – along with a personal endorsement – and your content can then spread through social circles.

The problem is, this almost never “snowballs” like we might hope. I wrote a Quora answer that addresses the viral sharing myth. The gist of it is that even when people use the share buttons on your site, your content probably isn’t getting a huge lift from that action.

Until today.

With the Rapture allegedly scheduled for this afternoon, it is important to consider what will happen to our digital presences when we die. Many of us spend hours a day building connections and uploading content, but where will it all go? Will it just be left to gather dust online?

Moments after I finished my last how-to post on adding subtle pop-ups to your website, I was asked about the sliding widget at the bottom of the sidebar on Fresh on Campus.

As I was building the layout for that site, I ran into the standard conundrum when designing layouts for blogs: you have no idea how “tall” the main column of posts will be, so it’s impossible to build a sidebar that doesn’t have one of two problems.

Either the sidebar hangs way down past the bottom of the content, making the scroll bar unnecessarily tiny, or else it ends up too short, leaving an inordinate amount of wasted blank space next to your content

What is a designer to do!?